Viv Albertine > Quotes

“I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy. If language isn’t powerful, why not call your teacher a cunt?”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir

“No matter how silly you feel or uncool you look, no matter how small that voice inside you is, that voice telling you something isn’t right: listen to it.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir

“That’s the trouble with serious illness, and depression, you can’t imagine being well – like on a cold day you can’t imagine warmth – you live in the everlasting dread-filled moment.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡ Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Behind every successful woman is a man who tried to stop her.
- Graffiti on the wall of the women’s lavatory,
the George Tavern, East London”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“You have no idea how grief will take you. The same with severe illness, motherhood, any profound experience. You don’t know yourself. Others don’t know you. These events show who you are. And you’ll be surprised, shocked even. You’ll feel the way you feel when you’ve done a particularly offensive-smelling shit – That couldn’t possibly have come out of me – and start to rationalize it – Must be that bag of pistachios I ate earlier, or perhaps I am unwell. You can’t believe you could do something so foul and unrecognizable. Something so outside yourself.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one. A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years – but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Having periods changed my personality: resentful and angry inside, I felt cheated and knew to the core of my being that life was unfair and boys had it easier than girls. A burning ball of anger and rebelliousness started to grow within me.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I hear a phone ringing through the thick fuzzy air. It's Thunders, asking me to join the Heartbreakers. He says to come over to the rehearsal studios right now. I’m scared but I go anyway. That should be written on my gravestone. She was scared. But she went anyway.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“You try all your life to be an adult, but something deep down inside you will always be that child.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“… maybe you can tell how much pain someone is in by watching them laugh.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“It's often not until after a decision is made that you know whether you've made the right choice. The relief tells you.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I’m too outspoken for most people, they think you’re rude if you tell the truth. ‘Punk’ was the only time I fitted in. Just one tiny sliver of time where it was acceptable to say what you thought.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“How can someone who's stood by you your whole life – who helped you empty the contents of the kitchen bin onto the floor when you were seventeen because you accidentally threw away a piece of hash the size of a cocoa nib, or who accompanied you, when she was eighty years old, to the Southbank Cinema on Mother's Day to watch hardcore gay and lesbian sex films because no one else would go with you (ditto a Sparks concert at the Royal Festival Hall) – how can that person, who you've been through so much with and who is now lying in front of you with snow-white hair, pale-grey eyes, soft pink skin and worry lines, not be beautiful?”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I think most people in long marriages have a touch of Stockholm Syndrome”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Then it occurred to me that there are two types of people: those who wait for the whole two lanes of a road to be completely clear before they venture across and those who risk it and charge into the middle, not knowing when they’ll get the chance to make a run for it to the other side. Neither is better than the other. The first one will have fewer problems and fewer adventures, and the second one will have more adventures and make more mistakes.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I adhered to this strategy right up to Mum's death, sharing experiences that I probably should have kept to myself, telling tales of drug-taking and STDs over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, graduating to infertility and marriage breakdown as I got older. There was never any condemnation from Mum, although she did gasp and shake her head sometimes. Whenever my life collapsed – which was often – I'd move back in with her, and no matter my age or what I was up to, she always put a hot-water bottle in my bed at night. [...]
Mum advised, supported and steered me through my many disasters. Whether I'd said something stupid to someone at a party, made a mistake at work, fallen out with a colleague, was lonely, applying for a job, in a difficult relationship or spiked with drugs at a nightclub, she helped me make sense of the situation and find a way forward.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I think there’s something very healthy about keeping your own cave clean. It is a good barometer of how your life is going, the state of your home. If it’s a complete tip, you’re taking on too much or depressed; if someone else has to keep it clean for you, it’s too big or you’re too busy.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I can't imagine what a happy home is like: parents cuddling and laughing, music playing, books on the shelves, discussions round the table? We don’t have any of that, but if Mum’s happy, I’m happy.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I could have dated younger men during the last five years, but lovely as some of them were, I didn't want to keep wincing inwardly whenever I referred to something that called attention to my age. Or not be able to share the difficulties of growing older, or have to keep explaining references. I'd like to be with someone kind who can hold a conversation and is in my age group. If that's too much to ask, I'll do without.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Skinny as Mum was, she'd always had a good appetite, so when she couldn't eat her roast potatoes I knew the end must be nigh.
[...] We opened our presents and Mum put a polka-dot shower cap on her head and let us take pictures of her in it, which was most unlike her, she liked to be a bit dignified about things. This was another indication that she knew she was dying. Other signs to look out for are when an elderly person starts giving away their things – usually about two or three years before they die – and if they insist, rather aggressively, on returning anything they've borrowed or get annoyed if you give them gifts – they don't want any more clutter.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“We dressed outrageously, behaved aggressively, and fought every obstacle that came our way with a zeal that would have been impossible at that time in history if we’d had fathers.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“But somehow, without me noticing it happening, I became someone who after every failure, rejection and mistake can pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. That life skill, the first one you need, came from my mother. So thanks to her, despite the rest of my upbringing and my awkward personality, I've survived.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“The last time I was single the men I was looking at were in their thirties and I still had that youthful image fixed in my head. It was depressing at first, choosing from a pool that's not regarded as desirable or vital in your society. [...] I managed to re-educate myself eventually. Now I'm only attracted to people my age. A young face looks like a blank page to me.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I think of it as saying Yes to Nothing. If your choice is either the wrong thing or nothing, however frightened you are, you’ve got to take nothing. Haven’t you? Hasn’t everyone? No husband, no lover, no band, no money, no confidence. Here goes nothing.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir

“There's a moment in the buddleia's lifecycle, purple flowers blooming, cabbage white butterflies flitting, when it's beautiful and triumphant, sprouting out of the broken wall without an ounce of earth to flourish in. That's what we humans have to do, I think whenever I see it, keep blooming despite the barren circumstances we sometimes find ourselves in. After a few weeks the buddleia becomes a weed again, , with grime-splattered leaves and crispy brown flowers that never fall off. You can only fight so hard, and for so long, before your environment engulfs you.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Sometimes my bladder is the only reason I get up. Not even hunger can shift me – the only time I can stand to be hungry is when I'm in bed. I've discovered that if I lie still and count to about ninety, the hunger pangs go away. They're like heartbreak: you just have to acknowledge the pain and wait until it passes.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“I ignore him. I never look at him or speak to him and change my phone number. It’s the only way to deal with an obsessive.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I also tried to look conventionally attractive when I was in the Slits, but kicked against it at the same time. It's a painful position to be in, having a side, but being inexorably drawn to the other side too.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened